By Anna Gaskell Observer Staff Writer (Nevis) – There are clothes drying on the lines outside the Community Centre on Hanley’s Road. They belong to men, women, and children; the colours are bright. There are a few young men sitting outside under the tree, keeping cool in the shade. Everyone else is indoors, watching TV and chatting amongst themselves. A boy of about four comes out of the room, holding on to an attractive woman who is probably his mother. One man is sitting by himself in the corridor. He looks like he might be the one from Peru; he has dark curly hair and a wise Indian face. These are the 47 illegal immigrants who arrived in Nevis by boat after Hurricane Omar. The boat, Pretty Girl, is about 40 feet long and bare inside except for the consul. If there hadn’t been 48 people inside it on the journey, the three 225-horsepower Mercury engines might have sent the front of the boat into the sky. The people at customs don’t know what to do with the boat. It looks the kind of boat that would be impractical for anything other than transporting people or goods from A to B as fast as possible. It certainly wouldn’t have been a comfortable journey. According to Police Superintendent Samuel Seabrookes, the GPS system on the boat allowed the police to track the path of the boat to Nevis. The GPS device showed the boat traveled from Martinique to Antigua to Dominica and Nevis. Thursday Online Code for Issue # 731 is OCT But only one of the illegal immigrants is from Martinique, and none are from Antigua or Dominica. The majority of them are from Haiti, but there are individuals from Peru, Cuba, St. Vincent, and Martinique too. So how did they all end up on the same boat? Superintendent Seabrookes says that everyone in the group told the police the same thing: It was dark when they got on the boat, they had to follow a flashing light to find where it was, and they don’t know who was on the boat before or after them. They won’t tell authorities who was in charge of the boat. The police released one of the 48 illegal immigrants (it is unclear why), which is why there are only 47 living in the Community Centre now, but they say they don’t know if that person was in charge of the boat.” Each of the illegal immigrants says the same thing about their hoped-for destination. They were all told it would be “an American country.” Perhaps they are afraid to say where they were really going, or perhaps they were desperate enough to settle for such an unspecific place. “An American country” could be anywhere in the U.S Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, or even America itself. Last year, a boatload of people was found by the coast guard off St. Kitts, Superintendent Seabrookes said. The vessel’s passengers were told by the person driving the boat that they were in St. Thomas. And then he drove off in the boat and left them. The Nevis police are no more pleased to have the illegal immigrants on their hands than the St. Kitts police were then: they are busy making arrangements for them to leave. “We just can’t afford it,” Superintendent Seabrookes said.” They have two difficulties to resolve, he said: “One is finding out where to send them, and two is getting the funds together to send them there.” According to Superintendent Seabrookes, the Nevis police just have to prove that their last port of call was Dominica, and then ” regardless of the fact that none of them is Dominican – that is where they will get sent back to. From then on, they would become Dominica’s responsibility. For now, they are still Nevis’s responsibility. Nevis is not the worst place to land up in by mistake. Despite spending their first two nights cramped in the Customs holding room, arrangements were quickly made to keep them somewhere more comfortable. “They are human beings and we treat them as such,” Superintendent Seabrookes said. This is where the Disaster Management team comes into the story. The Director of the government’s Disaster Management Department, Lester Blackett, was contacted by Superintendent Seabrookes on the evening of the day the illegal immigrants were found off the Longpoint area. The Disaster Management Department would be there to “assist in their well being,” Superintendent Seabrookes said.” Mr. Blackett has since been looking after the humanitarian side of things, making sure they have bedding, clothing, and food. The difficulty, according to Mr. Blackett, is that he can’t buy food and water to last for as much as a week, but instead he has to buy only a day or two’s supply at a time. This is because he doesn’t know – nobody apparently knows – whether they will be leaving tomorrow, next week, or next month. He says the Emergency Response Fund, which is covering most of the costs for supplies, is not limitless. Pressure on the limited fund has been eased by donations of food and clothing that have come from various organisations on Nevis. The donations have included food, clothing, and toys for the two young children, a girl and a boy. The group at the Community Centre has been visited by teams from the Department of Health; Mr. Blackett says that two of them were kept in hospital for a couple of days, but it was “nothing serious.” They”ve also been visited by priests from some of the churches. While the group of 47 wait for a decision to be made about where they will be sent – and when ” many of them have been playing friendly football matches with the security guards at the Community Centre. Of course, Mr. Blackett says, there were on-duty guards who did not get involved during the matches. But the football demonstrates that the relationship between the security guards and the illegal immigrants is “good and respectful.”” Mr. Blackett says he doesn’t want to give any opinion on what should be done with the group. But he does add, “It’s not necessarily their fault why they”re here . . .We can all be in situations of dependency,” even if the causes for it are different. There are people on Nevis who have more freely voiced their opinion. Some have suggested looking into the possibility of any Nevisian families putting up members of the group in their homes, and then getting the young ones in to school. Others have said that we should put the illegal immigrants to work; for example, they could help with the Four Seasons clear up. Superintendent Seabrookes said that he cannot understand why they left their homes in the first place; he would never leave Nevis if things were bad here, to go somewhere new where he would have no status. The only way to migrate to a new country is to go through the legal channels, he said. “If they come in illegally, we have to send them back,” he said. Perhaps this group of illegal immigrants didn’t have the time or the money to fill in all the forms. Perhaps they couldn’t prove that they were economically independent, in which case they would have been sent away anyway. Things must have been bad for them at home to make them spend their money and risk their lives on a potentially doomed passage to “an American country.”
